Why what you do with an email attached document shows your age

So your sitting at home or in the office, your reading your email, a mail comes in with a word doc or a PDF attachment. What you do next ages you..

If it was a picture, you and most people would click, open and view the picture it’s what we do with images. We are conditioned to do this which is why how we handle written documents is interesting. We are happy to view images on the screens of many devices laptop, phone, tablet all good for viewing millions of pixels.

Receive a document however and I am willing to bet there is a split right down the age around 35 where anyone over prints it and anyone over reads it on the screen.

Ok, huge generalisation there however from observing the printer usage at work for the last month it’s the older ones in the office who are more likely to print an attachment and often just leave it on the printer if it doesn’t print in seconds..

Ok, so it’s not always the case as well, the length of the document also has something to do with it, the common argument is that reading the screen gives them a headache, let’s be honest, you don’t know how to setup your screen if this is the case as it is too bright..

As a sidebar I’ve recently watched someone spend a few hours adding animations to a PowerPoint doc, to meticulous degree and then print and hand out the slides to everyone..

The movement to on the move computing, that’s mobiles and phones to the rest of us has and will change the face of document reading forever and the printer is going the same way as the film camera. All too often now it is just as easy to read the doc on the go. Collaborating and making this a group experience.

As I have just read on Facebook, paper as a medium is dead, digital is here and how old you are is the difference.